Will Microsoft and Xbox rule online identities in the future?

March 22, 2011 By 3 Comments

A really interesting Microsoft internal team video has appeared on the web, showing the ambition of the Windows Gaming Experience team for your Xbox avatar to become your identity and persona in the digital world.

It’s really interesting in light of some of my previous thoughts regarding Xbox Live Avatars, when I claimed back in 2008 that introducing avatars was a big mistake. And more rcently on both gamification, virtual worlds, and the idea of any company providing a single digital identity for us.

I’m a big Xbox gamer and fan, and I don’t think that Microsoft would be any worse than trusting a single identity to Facebook or Google. I also don’t think they’d be any better, despite the fact that avatars are slowly becoming better implemented and utilised in ways that are actually interesting and useful. My thoughts are probably summed up by the fact every article I see on single identities is tagged in Google Reader with ‘oneidisaf*****gstupididea’ – I’ll let you fill in the blanks. But so much of the momentum for a single ID seems to come from educated white male digital professionals who are comfortable with teir online personas and indeed often build businesse around them.

People are human, fallible, and occasionally secretive for good reasons as well as bad ones. Or will Microsoft introduce a ‘private browser’ setting that puts your avatar in a hat, shades and a long coat if you want to isit somewhere digitally that might be adults only, for example?

There is one other possibility which I’m starting to think about – the sanitised proprietary web experience of being locked into Microsoft or Facebook worlds with an ID which is tied to you for life, and a seedy underworld open web, where you can be who you want, do what you want (within reason), and actually learn, grow and evolve by mistakes as well as successes. I know which one immediately seems more fun and interesting to me.

Filed Under: Digital Culture, Facebook, Gamification, Videogames, xbox 360 Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Really social gaming

December 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Call of Duty: Black Ops is an amazingly popular game for the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, having had sales of over $1 billion in the first 45 days since launch. The first six weeks has also seen a whopping 600 million hours of game time, with the average player managing 87 minutes every single day.

And there’s definitely a social element in the online multiplayer game, with teams competing in deathmatch or objective based games. Over the last year or so, I’ve been playing regularly with the same group of friends, and from that group, only a couple were people I previously knew offline.

CALL OF DUTY BLACK OPS

Image by The Master Shake Signal via Flickr

But tonight, that’s changing. I’m just about to go to a local pub and meet-up with a group of guys who I’ve chatted with most evenings for a year, and yet never met. Some of them will have driven a couple of hours to get here, and if you looked at the age range, professions, demographic information etc, we’d never have met.

And that isn’t an isolated event – don’t forget that a huge social element of gaming actually takes place in the real offline world.

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Filed Under: Digital Culture, Gamification, Social Gaming, Videogames Tagged With: , , , , ,

An example of the direct effect of social…

November 11, 2010 By 1 Comment

As a specialist in social media (as part of digital and mobile marketing), I’m not immune to the influence of my own social networks. And that was driven home to me earlier this week, with a direct result in financial terms.

I’ve been playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 a lot over the past year, and during that time, a group of mainly UK, 30-something gamers has gathered within one or two degrees of my social circle. It’s quite a small group in terms of the more organised ‘Clans’, but there’s enough of us, and enough dedication/obsession to mean that some of the group are online pretty much any evening that you care to look. (And many of them are 30+ professionals, backing up the theory online gaming is the new golf for business networking!)

Last Monday at midnight saw the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops – the new game in the CoD series. Given that MW2 is the biggest-selling game of all time in the UK (20 million sold), and a cursory look at my own friends list reveals a range in ranks going down to the 13 million+ mark, it’s fair to say that Black Ops was a pretty big event. Although even I was a little surprised to see exactly how many people turned out locally for the launch – hundreds were queuing when I happened to finish an evening of work and make the snap decision to try and pick up a copy in the middle of the night.

That’s right – I went out at about 00:30 on Tuesday morning to pick up a videogame, thinking there might be a few other obsessives, and I turned the corner of the shopping centre to find a few hundred people.

And I was purely driven by social motives:

I already have more games than I can feasibly finish, including the previous games in the series. And although the fun of a new game is attractive, Black Ops isn’t something which attracted me for that reason (as compared to Kinect, Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsport etc).

There were two reasons for paying a premium in terms of financial cost (Wait a while and copies will be cheaper), and time (Sacrificing sleep to make a purchase, and the time since that I’ve already put into the game).

  • The loss of my social circle: All of my MW2 friends had stated they’d buy Black Ops within the first 1-2 days. That almost immediate loss of a social group was a prime driver in sending me out to the shops.
  • A chance to gain social status: I’m not the best at Call of Duty, although I blame a lot of it on slow internet speeds. During MW2 I suffered a couple of console hardware failures and as a result, missed large amounts of game time. This meant that I was only able to reach the medium level of in-game ranks – lower than quite a number of friends. By purchasing at launch, I had the chance to possibly get a little headstart on some of the group, and potentially I might end up as one of the top players in the group (Sadly that plan hasn’t quite worked, as I’m still not playing the new game particularly well!).

The end result?

  • £42 for the game purchase with added special offer of Xbox gamer points.
  • 1.5 hour of time spent purchasing the game and immediately coming home to try it instead of sleeping.
  • 10+ hours of time spent playing the game since I first brought it home.

And in case you’re tempted to think about this as the example of a particularly unusual and obsessive gamer, Black Ops has largely been sold on the online multi-player aspect of the game. And the first day figures have just been released:

  • UK and US sales in first day: 5.6 million copies, beating 4.7 million for MW2.
  • Revenue to publishers Activision in the first two days is estimated at $360 million.
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Filed Under: Digital Culture, Social Gaming, social networks, Videogames Tagged With: , , , , ,

Three more reasons not to under-estimate gaming

November 3, 2010 By 3 Comments

Most people are probably aware that I’m deeply interested in videogames and the gamification of the world which is occurring as more and more businesses and individuals look at what is able to be produced by game methodology.

For example:

  • More than a billion hours are being spent on Xbox Live each month. That’s just one of the three console platforms, and it equates to each of the 25 million current Xbox Live subscribers contributing around 40 hours of time each month.
  • Taken globally across every platform, there are figures as high as 3 billion hours a week. And while efforts to adapt that productivity are underway, it turns out that besides the potential risks of addiction etc, gaming actually may be beneficial to your health and wellbeing in some specific ways. That is – no matter how superficial the game and the output, by enabling you to experience positive emotions and social bonds, you’re likely to live longer, do better at work, and even have longer, happier marriages.
  • There’s a brilliant quote in the video of Tom Chatfield embedded below which sums up online gaming perfectly. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans have evolved in certain ways to perform tasks and get enjoyment from them. Crucially, videogames allow us to reverse-engineer everything, to create worlds which are perfectly tailored to the ways that humans have evolved.

Another of the points he makes which deserves repeating is the fact that an online game allows the measurement of over 1 billion data points – everything that anyone has ever done in that entire world can be tracked, measured and used for optimisation.

And it also justifies the inordinate amount of time I’ve spent in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 recently – the combination of a social group who are online almost nightly, and the rat pellet feed of rewards and achievements for frenetic (and frustrating on a slow net connection) action.

The other element of the games industry that will be of interest to the publishing/marketing/media non-gamers is that the games industry is relatively young, highly technical, and going through the same challenges as traditional media – how to compete with the challenges of a second-hand games market, how to utilise the ability for gamers to digitally download content, how to implement freemium and subscription models etc.

The difference is that there’s a lot less legacy and inertia to overcome – hence the success of Steam, or the release of the demo/minigame Dead Rising 2:Case Zero as a paid download exclusively for the Xbox 360. It sold 300,000 copies in the first week, and over 500,000 in the first fortnight as a prequel to the forthcoming full retail game, and as content sufficient enough to stand alone.

Through in motion-controls which are going to reach enough people to have an influence almost on a par with the touchscreens of smartphones and tablets, and there’s a lot there – something I’ll continue to expand upon…

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